As the amended Education Law allows Vietnamese universities to make independent decisions on opening new academic majors, a number of local universities have announced the launch of new majors to attract students for the school year 2021-2022.

New majors that are popular include those in science and engineering field, such as biomedical engineering, medical biotechnology, robotics and AI, data science and environmental engineering.

There are also interdisciplinary training programmes such as food business management in which students will study business administration and food technology.

New majors in relation to the health sector will also be launched by a number of private universities in the South, such as oral health, dentistry, nutrition, nursing and hospital management. However, there is also concern about quality assurance of local universities on new healthcare majors. The Ministry of Health will soon issue regulations on examinations for practitioner certificates, which is required to be taken by medical graduates if they want to work in the health sector, and which will also help assess the training quality of universities in this field.

Read further at: https://vietnamnews.vn/society/858049/universities-offer-new-majors-for-...

Comments from Lien Ta, Senior Education Services Manager:

One main reason for many local universities to open new majors is they aim to develop into a multidisciplinary university that can train students in different fields. Besides, the opening of new majors also allow local universities to diversify their training programmes to attract more students, given the fact that student recruitment to local universities has become much more competititve over the past few years. However this also puts a question on quality assurance activities of local universities to ensure quality outcomes and employment opportunities for their graduates. The Ministry of Education and Training has issued regulations on the opening of new majors at universities, setting out strict requirements on academic level of teachers, training facilities and curriculum. However, the quality assurance activities need to be managed and supervised at the institutional level throughout the whole training time to make sure the institution really practises their academic autonomy.

There are also opportunities for UK universities to explore TNE programmes with local universities in some new majors. However, understanding the academic strength of the potential local partners, and the objective as well as capacity of them in running new training programmes, is very important for UK universities to make sure a success of TNE partnership in these new majors.